Hong Kong Dub

"I wonder why Japanese people keep moving their mouths after they're through talking."

— Calvin, Calvin and Hobbes

A dub that deals with Lip Lock by paying little or no attention to Mouth Flaps, such that the characters' voices typically begin and/or end out of sync with their mouth movements, and rarely match them when the two happen at the same time. The result is often an unintentional Gag Dub. Nowadays, it is often still present in advertisements.

This is especially problematic for foreign dubs of Western Animation since voice recording is done first with the animation being done after to match. Anime, however, doesn't run into this problem as much since there really isn't any lip syncing to be done (most anime have the characters talk by simply moving their mouths up and down◊), but the timing and general mouth movements still prove to be an issue for English dubs. As the page quote hints, another inherent linguistic reason is that Japanese tends to take more syllables compared to the same sentence in other major languages like English or Mandarin. It's also easier for video games to avoid this since editing the lip syncing is cheaper to do thanks to being done in-engine.

Also called the "Hercules Dub" for its appearance in Sword and Sandal movies imported from Italy during the 1960s, particularly the various Hercules movies starring Steve Reeves. In the case of these old Italian films it's a problem even in the original language. Most older Italian films were shot MOS and dubbed, before good ADR techniques existed.

Common in any parody of Martial Arts Movie movies or Japanese Toku.

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Straight Examples:

Anime and Manga

• This (among other things) happens at times in the Hong Kong-produced dubs of Transformers: ★Headmasters, Masterforce, and Victory which aired on Malaysian television.
  • The Hungarian dub of Transformers: Armada is comparable to these, save for the fact that it has proper, professional, and not all-that-bad voice actors, who simply happen to not give a damn about the whole cartoon, and have a hard time paying attention to mouth movements. That goes for the first 30 episodes or so. The dub vastly improved once the cartoon's plot began to thicken.
• The Serbian dub of Tokyo Mew Mew is notorious for having very low production value and poor lip-syncing. Some lines are at least 3 seconds off in both "too early" and "too late". It got worse as it went on, although it got better around episode 30. Unfortunately, it was not to last. It got bad again about 10 episodes later...
  • The Portuguese dub of the second half of Mew Mew was also bad with lip syncing, although the voice actors sounded more professional than the Serbian actors (all 4 of them!).
• Watch Dragon Ball Z in Serbian. Laughs are guaranteed. And yes, it's OFFICIAL.
• Speed Racer tended to slip into this (when it wasn't Motor Mouth Lip Lock). Of course, since they only had two days to dub each episode it's a miracle they were able to sync as well as they did.
• The English dubbed version of Macross: Do You Remember Love? was rumored to be used as an education tool to teach English. It featured an interesting bunch of Australian and Hong Kong voice actors. See for yourself.
• The old 1979 English dub of The Mystery of Mamo varies widely in terms of lip-syncing — some lines are dead-on sync, while others completely ignore the mouth-flaps.
• Strangely enough, the Japanese version of Ghost Stories played this straight while the Gag Dub matches up surprisingly well (and frequently made fun of it in the process).
• The English dub of Guin Saga has become pretty notorious for its poor production values, poor voice acting, and poor lip-syncing. It's unusually bad for a dub from Seraphim Digital Studios (formerly ADV), whose dubs had been fairly well-received. Check out how AWFUL this dub is. It's especially weird considering that the first half's dub… wasn't that bad. For some reason, Seraphim was rushed on part two, and not only did the quality decline, half of the cast ended up changed.
• The Finnish dub of Lady Lady!!, released on VHS. It contains very poor voice acting (Lynn shifts from sounding like a young child to an adult, and Thomas sounds like a robot) and characters constantly move their mouths when no audio is coming out, and vice versa. The most egregious example is the scene where Edward falls off his horse and begans screaming in pain...but because the audio and video don't match up, the audio of Edward screaming plays while the animation shows him clenching his teeth in frustration, staying like that for a good number of seconds.
• When the Iga No Kabamaru anime was dubbed in Greek, the frequent mouth flaps posed a problem to the Greek dubbing team, so they tried to fill this in with the repetition of phrases, as well as swearing. Part of why Greek audiences remember it for it's So Bad, It's Good charm.
• The English dub of Tamagotchi, commissioned directly by the Japanese distributor and recorded at a barely-known studio in the Miami area, often has lip movements not matching the dialogue as well as they probably should. Despite this, the episode Ding Dong! You Have a Visitor! averts this, as the lip sync is considerably better than in most episodes.
  • This extends to the fact that even the Japanese version sometimes does this as well. Perhaps the dubbing studio tried to imitate the way they did it?
• Many of the English dubs produced by Animax Asia (via Omni Productions, Red Angel Media, and Medi-Lan Ltd.) suffer from this. Not to mention, the dubs are actually recorded in Hong Kong, hence the trope name.
• Played for Laughs in one Cromartie High School sketch, where the characters notice that their voices come out delayed relative to their lip movements.
• The Slovenian dub of Kishin Douji Zenki has quite noticeable de-sync issues, which is sad since it's one of the few anime to receive a Slovenian dub. Judge for yourself.

Asian Animation

• In Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf, it's very common for lip movements to not match the dialogue at all.

Fan Works

• Hunters of Justice: Done Un Universe. The Legion Of Superheroes have rings that translate their spoken words into the appropriate language and dialect whenever they Time Travel. But while it's subtle, Jonah Hex points out that you can see a Legionnaire's lip movement won't match the translated words if you look closely enough and know what to look for.

Films — Animation

• Dingo Pictures films are infamous for having horrible lip sync. However, this trope is taken to the extreme by even the original German-language versions having bad lip sync, let alone the dubs, often resulting in long stretches of mouth flaps with no audible dialogue.
• Every non-Japanese dub of AKIRA suffers from this, owing to the fact that unlike most anime, the Japanese voices were recorded first and the mouths drawn to match. Essentially, this made it like a live action film. The second English version from Animaze does make an effort to follow the animation more closely than the Streamline dub. How well it works is a matter of opinion.
• An American Tail, again, the Hungarian dub. The dub's creators really did have a horrible sense of timing. You could hear the actors just getting ready to speak when the characters have already mouthed full sentences. The sound effects are also nearly fully muted out. Strangely completely averted by the dub of its sequel, done by the same cast.
• Samson and Sally, originally a Danish film, blundered into this in several scenes of the English dub.
• The English dubs of Joseph Lai's animated films: Ali Baba & the Gold Raiders, Beauty and Warrior, and Space Thunder Kids. There are times when the voices don't even bother to sync with the mouths.
• Felix the Cat: The Movie was animated in several European countries, mainly Hungary, but with help from Polish and Bulgarian studios too. The result is a lot of sloppy lip-syncing that doesn't come close to matching what the characters are saying.
• Doogal, which is the American dub of The Magic Roundabout (2005), suffers horribly from this, seeing as how most of the dialogue makes reference to pop culture.
  • This also applies to other animated films localised by the infamous Harvey Weinstein. Other victims of this process include The Thief and the Cobbler, Hoodwinked!, Ballerina, Metegol, and Leo the Lion, among many others. In many of these cases, characters speak loudly even when their lips are visibly not moving. Usually averted for alternate dubs not made by Miramax/The Weinstein Company, however.
    • One of the more notable Weinstein dubs, Princess Mononoke, is an aversion, however. It was well-praised for its Woolseyism courtesy of Neil Gaiman to the point that people thought the film was reanimated for the English dub and said English dub was rereleased in Japanese cinemas with Japanese subtitles. Though the faithfully Woolseyised dub was the cause of Executive Meddling gone right with director Hayao Miyazaki interfering to avoid the film from being given a butchered Arabian Knight Hong Kong Dub treatment. One can only imagine the horrors that await when Miyazaki's masterpiece is butchered by Harvey Scissorhands.
• Pinocchio: A True Story's English dub doesn't really try to match the lip synching, resulting in the characters' mouths frequently moving after they've finished talking. In the infamous Lionsgate US redub with Pauly Shore, the lip synching is even more off in addition to the wooden acting.
• Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island has a single line from Lena ("I've had years of practice!") that doesn't match the lip sync at all. It's speculated that the line was changed at the last second, after animation was complete. The rest of the film doesn't suffer from this though.
• Despite Studio Ghibli's reputation for having Superlative Dubbing and Woolseyism in the English dubs, thanks in particular to Disney and GKIDS' efforts, some of the English dubs have been legitimate Hong Kong dubs.
  • Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind had the infamous Warriors of the Wind dub courtesy of New World Pictures. A slight detail in the film has the gas masks of the people from the Valley of the Wind flop around whenever they start talking. This has been followed in both the original Japanese and Disney's later uncut English dub. On the other hand, Warriors has the characters silent even when the masks flop around and vice versa in some scenes. It is quite jarring after watching either the original Japanese or the Ghibli-approved Disney dub.
    • The first two Cantonese dubs of the film had a literal Hong Kong Gag Dub that featured contemporary pop culture references, Dub Name Changes galore, humor that specifically dates the dub to 1980s Hong Kong, and very little regard for the lip-synching. For the Blu-ray remaster, the film would be given a third Cantonese dub that would be much Truer to the Text and had much better lip-synching.
  • Castle in the Sky, My Neighbor Totoro, Kiki's Delivery Service and Porco Rosso have had pre-Disney English dubs commissioned by Tokuma Shoten as in-flight movie releases for Japan Airlines and for the Hong Kong market (making these dubs literal Hong Kong dubs despite not being recorded in Hong Kong). This is subverted for Totoro and Kiki as the acting and lip synching is quite competent despite the low production values of these dubs. Played straight for Castle and Porco. Some people still prefer these dubs for a variety of reasons, even if they are Hong Kong dubs that have since become rare after the release of Disney's later and more professional redubs.
  • Only Yesterday suffers from this in some dubs since the adult sequences, just like AKIRA, had the voices recorded before the animation. GKIDS' later English dub attempts to match the lip synching and it mostly works well.
  • Earwig and the Witch, being Studio Ghibli's first All-CGI Cartoon, was animated with the Japanese voice acting in mind. This makes it so that most dubs to other languages would be Hong Kong dubs. GKIDS' English dub, despite being mostly competent, is still somewhat of a Hong Kong dub.

Films — Live-Action

• The former trope namer is the Italian-produced Hercules films of the late-1950s and '60s. Italian films of the time were shot without live-sound, all dialogue and foley effects were dubbed in later. Often this was a necessity, due to international casts where a shared language wasn't guaranteed — the Hercules films typically starred American or British leads, with a European supporting cast. Actors would either recite lines in their native language, or learn them phonetically. Consequently, every version of the film, including the "original" Italian ones, would have some degree of loose lips.
  • The same applies to other Italian movie genres, like Spaghetti Westerns (including The Dollars Trilogy), Giallo, and Poliziottesco; all of which were shot MOS until the late 1980s.
• The Harold Lloyd film Welcome Danger (1929) was originally shot as a silent film, but with Hollywood going over to talkies, Lloyd elected to make it his talkie debut. Some of the film was re-shot with synchronized sound. Other scenes feature dialogue and sound effects dubbed over the original silent footage. The dubbing is very, very bad.
• Just watch these clips from the movie Hard Gun. Epic Fail from the dubbers.
• Done in Shaolin Soccer, which only enhances the utter absurdity of the movie to epic cheese levels.
• All of the Godzilla movies from Godzilla vs. Gigan onward (except Godzilla 1985 and Godzilla 2000) were released in America with crude "international" or "export" dubs commissioned by Toho (the studio producing the films) and actually created by Omni Productions in Hong Kong. The mismatched lip movement is at times painful to watch, and the acting and writing is pretty awful too. Some of the pre-Gigan films have both international dubs and superior dubs produced in the US, but due to Toho's preference for the dubs they commissioned themselves, the American dubs having been getting harder to find in recent decades except for cases where there is no international alternative. Some of the international dubs are well-liked for their delightful silliness but others are maligned for just being flat-out awful.
• Star Wars Trilogy: Despecialized Edition suffers this when a dub included with the preservation originates from the Special Editions (such as Thai), most notable in the Mos Eisley scenes in A New Hope and Vader's conversation with the Emperor in The Empire Strikes Back. English audio options and dubs produced prior to 1997 don't suffer from this problem.
• From Hungary: the dub of Transformers (2007). The timing is about half a second off in most cases. Then, there is Ironhide's line about exterminating the parents, which he says during Optimus' reaction to his suggestion, and also Judy's "You're so cheap." comment, spoken about 10 seconds too early.
• Another notoriously bad movie dub, also from Hungary, this time Beetlejuice. The voice timing is so off, it is baffling.
• The English dub of the movie Hai-Alarm Auf Mallorca (Shark Attack in the Mediterranean). "SHARK ALARM!"
• The Celebrity Voice Actor-cast English-language dub of Roberto Bengini's 2002 adaptation of Pinocchio. This may have been a case of Christmas Rushed: North American distributor Miramax had just over two months to dub the film after it opened in Italy in order to get it released on Christmas Day in the continent. According to the Other Wiki, the dubbing process was the official reason it was Not Screened for Critics! The film bombed upon release and became fodder for Jay Leno on The Tonight Show – he joked that the dubbing was so bad, Britney Spears walked out of a screening.
• A lot of imported movies to Japan will be dubbed in Japanese. While they try not to make it as obvious, it's still a little jarring, albeit this was more common in older dubs from the 60s to 80s than newer ones.
• The history of bad foreign dubs into English is one of the reasons that subtitles are generally preferred for non-animated foreign media, especially art-house films, in the English-speaking world.
• Sheet metal worker Sid Leverents made an incredibly visually sophisticated short film called Multiple SIDosis, but the post-dubbing of dialogue in the opening scene is not very good.
• A hallmark of Federico Fellini's career. Fellini routinely filmed without sound recording and looped all the dialogue in post-production. Actors on set would simply count down from 100, rather than recite actual dialogue. Sometimes it works and a viewer can't tell, but just as often it doesn't work and the dubbing is very very obvious. La Strada, Nights of Cabiria, Juliet of the Spirits, and other Fellini films all have very obvious dubbing.
• Just Visiting (The Remake of Les Visiteurs) was filmed in the English language (with the same French actors as the original, Jean Reno and Christian Clavier) then was redubbed in French. With the American actors there isn't much of an issue as they were handled by experienced French voice actors, but for Reno and Clavier, what they say (since they dubbed themselves) never matches the moves of their mouths (they had no experience of dubbing live-action stuff, they dubbed animals in Homeward Bound: The Incredible Journey and Reno had dubbed animation only up to this point — the eponymous character in Porco Rosso and King Mufasa in The Lion King most famously).
• Killer's Kiss: After having difficulty with the boom mike casting shadows in his shots, Stanley Kubrick elected to dub in all the dialogue after-the-fact. In certain scenes it doesn't match up very well.
• The Room (2003) has an unusual example in that the "dub" is the original language; a large portion of Tommy Wiseau's lines as Johnny are obviously looped with little regard for lip-flaps.
• In Jackie Chan's Police Story 4: First Strike, the English dubbing of the conversations between Chinese-speaking characters suffers greatly from this.
• Tickles the Clown: Thanks to the movie's Conspicuous CG, Tickles' and Alistair Crowley's mouth movements don't sync up to the words they're saying.

Live-Action TV

• A surprising number of Chinese series fall victim to this in their original language. It's caused by two things. First, a Same Language Dub is expected (and necessary because of the huge differences between Chinese dialects), so voice actors dub over the actors' lines. Second, the censors often demand changes to the dialogue, so the lines the actors said aren't the lines the voice actors record.
  • The Rise of Phoenixes is a rare example of the actors dubbing themselves, but even so it falls victim to this trope because the script had been changed by the time they recorded their lines.
• Power Rangers:
  • Observed in Rita Repulsa in the original Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers. This was even preserved in the movie, where they actually could have avoided it, for the Camp value.
  • The same thing happens with Mystic Mother in Power Rangers Mystic Force. It's actually because they're the same person.
  • In Mighty Morphin, it's also observed with Zordon and Scorpina.
  • Even though they don't have mouths outside their helmets, the stock footage can also suffer from this in some seasons where they didn't even bother to retroscript the lines to the footage after translating the Japanese lines and editing them to fit the new narratives, mostly in seasons that heavily rely on the stock footage, so the dialogue for said footage was originally meant to be Japanese, or there might not have been dialogue at all in said footage originally, just music or grunting. For instance, just watch the first episode of Super Megaforce, since they used footage from the first 2 episodes of Gokaiger, and the main plot and characters are nothing like its source material, they had to fit a lot of quick Ass Pull explanations where the footage didn't allow, hoping people wouldn't notice, or put in dialogue that was unnecessary and just wouldn't let the scenes play and let the viewer enjoy them. There's also a lethal dose of puns over the fight footage that really don't belong and aren't really that funny.
• Fairly common in Brazilian dubs of Mexican soap operas (take into account that Spanish is only slightly similar to Portuguese). But then again, it's more likely to be a conspiracy against such overdone and boring plots, as the voice actors and dub directors themselves say that they prefer to dub action movies and anime, for being more dynamic.
• Pippi Longstocking suffers from this in English, since Swedish has visibly different vocal movements from English.
• The Italian dub of the first season of House suffers from this a lot: in more than one episode you can hear House's voice while Hugh Laurie's lips are completely shut, and that's just the tip of the iceberg. Luckily, the dub has improved in the following seasons.
• The Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode "Beer Bad" contains Xander's infamous outburst of "NOTHING CAN DEFEAT THE PENIS!" The line was clearly dubbed in during post-production, considering that his mouth movements don't match up exactly, and he sounds completely different when saying it.
• The French dub of Latin-American telenovelas broadcast on the public service channel for overseas territories, France Ô. In one particularly egregious case they had a 10-year-old dubbed by what was very obviously a middle-aged man, and generally speaking the dubs make the already Narmy dialogue worse.
• In the Supernatural episode "What Is and What Should Never Be" (S02, Ep20), Dean's mouth movements often do not match his speech while he gives a soliloquy at his father's grave.
• While not entirely in line with the trope, the German-Swedish criminal drama Der Kommissar und das Meer, with a cast made up of Germans and Swedes, had the non-native actors dubbed in the respective languages when the series was aired on TV in the respective countries, which was not appreciated in Sweden. The Swedes, not being used to dubbing other than for children's shows, immediately noticed the allegedly poor lip-syncing when the German actors' lines were dubbed in Swedish. To add insult to injury, a Swedish actor in the German cast had his voice dubbed by another actor entirely.

Video Games

• The English dub of Astral Chain runs into this issue during in-game cutscenes with skippable textboxes. Rendered cutscenes fare quite a bit better, but still have lip-flap issues on occasion.
• Asura's Wrath's English dub would get this every now and then depending on the episode. The most glaring moments, however, are in Episodes 11.5 and 15.5, mostly due to the fact that those particular episodes use anime cutscenes instead of in-game cutscenes.
• The Polish translation of Aztec Wars, especially painfully visible in the intro, where everyone and their mother move their lips even when quiet, as if they were all chewing gum.
• The dub of Dragon Ball Xenoverse 2 often falls into this during cutscenes, both in the ones made with the game engine and in the anime ones.
• The English dub of Final Fantasy X-2 has a lot of moments of this, often having close-up shots of the characters flapping their lips but saying nothing.
• Being focused on Chinese, the words spoken in Genshin Impact in English never match the mouth movements, if there are any attempts at mouth movements at all.
• The English version of God Eater Burst seems to have just decided to ignore the Mouth Flaps when they dubbed the game.
• Raidou Kuzunoha vs. The Soulless Army manages to do this with text. However, to its credit, it's not noticeable until the lip flaps do match up, such as when a character says a name, which remains unchanged (this is easiest to spot with the name "Raidou"). As it is in text, it is not at all jarring unless one is anal-retentive about it.
• Sonic the Hedgehog:
  • Sonic Adventure was known for little lip sync whatsoever, even in the original Japanese. Starting with Sonic Heroes, later games attempted to avoid this by syncing the mouth movements to the English dialogue. The side effect is that the Japanese version greatly suffers.
  • Back with a vengeance in Sonic the Hedgehog (2006), which not coincidentally is the last Sonic game where the English dialogue is obviously a dub. Especially noticeable whenever the human characters are speaking.
• Used for convenience's sake in Sam & Max Hit the Road, where the animation sprites for the characters just use a repeating, meaningless mouth flap loop. Lampshaded in one of Sam's failure dialogues, where Sam turns to face the player and tells them, "Read my lips -- I. Can't. Pick. That. Up.", with his lips doing the exact same loop as the entire rest of the time.
• Starting with Soulcalibur IV, the character models in the Soul Series were designed for specific dubs. In IV, the characters' mouths are synced to the Japanese dialogue, but are synced with the English dub in V and VI.
• Street Fighter IV has some of this, with Seth's introduction right before the final fight of arcade mode being the most noticeable. During his introduction, the character model itself has his mouth open for a few seconds as if he's saying "HAAAAAA", but Michael McConnohie's dialogue produces a few words during that animation. It's typically not noticeable, but at times its very obvious that they didn't care. This carries over to Street Fighter X Tekken, which uses a tweaked Street Fighter IV engine.
• The overworld skits in Tales of Symphonia have their Mouth Flaps synched to the original Japanese text. It's barely noticeable most of the time, since the skits aren't voiced, but now and then it's obvious that they're taking too long or not long enough to say a line. In one particular instance, Sheena takes six syllables to say "I...I...". ^note  Most likely watashi.
• Also done with Stan in the first two Monkey Island games. He almost never stops talking or waving his arms.
• ESPN NFL 2K5 makes no attempt to sync Chris Berman's voice with his in-game character model during the pregame segment that plays before every game. He has several different lines that he might say, but his mouth movements and facial expressions are identical every time.
• Xenoblade Chronicles 2 does this in two different ways. During cutscenes, the English dub does its best to properly match lip flaps for characters, but there are a few times that slip by now and then. Heart-to-Heart interactions are fully voiced, non-cutscene interactions between (usually) two characters that require the player to manually advance the dialogue. If they never press the button to advance, the current talking character will continue to animate their mouth until the other character continues the conversation. It should be noted too, that even the Japanese voice acting has moments where they fail to sync with the lip flaps.
• Painfully obvious during Zone of the Enders: The 2nd Runner's animated sequences, as they opted not to use CGI or live-action for characters. Apparently no attempts were made to sync the animation and dialogue, leading to some absolutely preposterous levels of lip-flapping in the English versions of the game.
• The otherwise great English dub of Dragon Ball Fighter Z runs into this quite a few times, such as the game's recreation of Krillin's second death.
• The Polish localisation of Mass Effect 2 DLC Kasumi: Stolen Memories features mouth flaps for Kasumi's mission comments that are not synced with the lines she says.
• In the English dubs of Valis II and III for the TurboGrafx-16 CD, the ostensibly phoned-in voice acting is way off-sync during the animated cutscenes.
• Gundam 0079: The War for Earth: The live actions scenes are filmed in English, with the Japanese release having the original voice actors dub over the lines. No attempt is made to match the lip sync.
• Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater features fantastic English voice acting across the board, something which came at the unfortunate cost of the vast majority of cutscenes not even remotely matching the characters' lip flaps.

Web Original

• The lip-syncing in early episodes of Yu-Gi-Oh! The Abridged Series was noticeably bad (or at the very least, not entirely in sync with the voice acting). It improved by season 2 onwards, however.
• The original Japanese version of episode 11 of Let's Go! Tamagotchi flubs up the lip sync at two points, one where Mametchi explains to Memetchi about Chamametchi not listening to him about staying home and another when Mametchi gets everybody to quiet down. The English dub fixes both of these.
• The Spanish dub of Battle for Dream Island does not modify the mouth animations to match the translated dialogue, leaving certain moments where the contestants are talking even if their mouths are not moving, and vice versa.

Western Animation

• The Hungarian dub of The Simpsons suffers from every dubbing-related problem you can think of, among them bad lip-sync, and it shows no signs of improvement, even after all this time.
• Likewise, Xiaolin Showdown in Hungarian. There are only about… two episodes you can enjoy without bumping into a serious dubbing error.
• In the Hungarian dub of Phineas and Ferb, the voice actors have to do a lot of ad-libbing, as if there was no dubbing director or any guidelines. However in later episodes it has gotten better.
• Given how many languages My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic has been dubbed into, it was inevitable this would happen at some point. Case in point: the Romanian dub, which doesn't even try to sync to the lip flaps – or even the beat – during songs.
  • Strangely enough, this happened in the original English in two spots during the episode "Read It and Weep". Both times it's obvious the actor recorded a line, came back later to rerecord and changed the line, but the animation wasn't updated.
  • The Croatian HRT dub in particular stands out as it manages to take it up a notch; on top of careless lip-syncing, the voice actors' recorded lines are oftentimes either too short or too long, which in the former case leads to either missing dialogue/empty air or line looping/replaying and in the latter case to lines frequently and blatantly overlapping each other. There are also a few cases like a line being so long that it pushes the next one out completely, essentially replacing it, and existing audio being copy-pasted into a new place (sometimes even including sound effects) instead of properly recording new dialogue, leading to glaringly non-existent lip-syncing. In very rare instances it becomes even more severe such as blatantly missing dialogue (for example, in "The Show Stoppers" the CMC's initial song rehearsal as Applejack listens is completely silent and Apple Bloom's remark about being librarians doesn't play, leaving her with just lip-syncing) and wrong dialogue audio (for example, when Fluttershy sings to Hummingway in "A Bird in the Hoof", she instead repeats one of her previous lines despite the clear fact she was supposed to be singing).
  • Even the Japanese dub of the first two seasons is not exempt from this. Case in point- in Lesson Zero, Sweetie Belle's lines about "her mane" goes like that, as the Japanese word for mane (Tategami) is a bit longer than "Mane" and it shows on the lip movement.
• Back during The Golden Age of Animation, the Fleischer Brothers typically fully animated their cartoons before the actors recorded any dialogue. As a result, lip sync (for anything that wasn't a song) was spotty at best. This is why the old Popeye shorts have all those "muttered ad-libs".
• The lip syncing in Danger Mouse is pretty consistently poor and the scenes are framed to necessitate as little as possible.
• The first three episodes of Aqua Teen Hunger Force had very noticeably poor lip-syncing. This is only an issue with those specific episodes though, since episode four onwards improved the syncing.
• Some foreign dubs of The Loud House actually skip some pieces of dialogue. A particular example is in the Italian dub of "Brawl in the Family", where towards the end one of Lincoln's lines stops halfway through, leaving the dialogue incomplete and his mouth flapping with no sound coming out.
• In the Norwegian dub of Fantastic Four: World's Greatest Heroes, one episode it looked like they forgot to dub Mister Fantastic's voice, meaning that every time he speaks in that episode, not a single sound comes out even though the other characters speaks perfectly normal.
• The producers of The Critic made a habit of changing lines after the animation was complete, resulting in many moments where the characters' mouth movements don't match their speech at all.

Parodies and intentional examples:

Comedy

• One Jeff Dunham skit featuring Peanut had Peanut claiming he could speak Japanese, and to prove it, he said "Godzilla." When Jeff says that's not Japanese, Peanut "corrects" himself; he opens and closes his mouth several times rapidly without saying a sound, and only when his mouth finally closes does he say "Godzilla!" Every so often, Peanut repeats the gag in later specials.

Comic Books

• The Dubbed One is the name of a Japanese agent in The Tick and related books. He was specially trained to talk that way so he could communicate with English speakers.

Fan Works

• Futari wa Pretty Cure Dragon is supposed to look like this in its writing style.
• The abridged series Ultra Fast Pony has many legitimate scenes where the creator couldn't be bothered to make the lip-flaps match his redubbed dialogue. But it also has a few scenes where he exaggerates and lampshades the mismatch: In "Now with a Sound Effect", Twilight says that the lip-synch in that episode is the best she's ever seen, without moving her lips at all. And in "This One Time at Flight Camp", Derpy talks without moving her mouth, attributing this to her newfound powers of telepathy.
• In the Star Trek: Voyager Parody Fic A Fistful of Mammary Gland this is caused by a faulty Universal Translator not being in sync, making everyone sound like they're in a Spaghetti Western.

Films — Animation

• The animated Asterix and Cleopatra parodies this at the end of its prologue about the Egyptian language, blaming it on antiquity's dubbing methods not being advanced enough.
• Whenever the Martians' language is translated in Mars Needs Moms.
• One of Horton’s Imagine Spots in Horton Hears a Who! (2008) is done in an Animesque style, with terribly translated English dubbing and mouth movements that don’t match up to the voices.

Films — Live-Action

• Kung Pow! Enter the Fist makes prodigious use of the trope. Using advanced Green Screen technology, it inserts Steve Oedekerk into a 1970s kung-fu movie, rewrites all the dialogue, and dubs in all the new lines this way — with all voices provided by Steve Oedekerk. Even the lines Oedekerk already said himself on screen. Being a comedy, it did the Hong Kong Dub deliberately:
  • At one point, the film dubs a dog barking. We see the dog bark, then it lies down on the ground, and then we hear it bark.
  • The film hardly bothers to even provide dialogue for Ling's mouth flaps, much of which are translated as "weooweooweooweooweoo".
  • Steve grabs a hold of Ling and screams at her ("I'm somebody's mommy!!"), while his dub voice calmly says, "I implore you to reconsider."
  • One fight that had no dialogue at all in the original became a scene involving ventriloquists:
    Voice: I'm the Chosen One, outside the wall!
    Betty: Your mouth tricks won't work on me, ventriloquists!
• What's Up, Tiger Lily?, a film directed and produced by Woody Allen, was one of the first to do this. A Japanese spy film, dubbed over with dialog about finding the recipe for the best egg salad in the world.
  Interviewer: So, Woody, would you like to explain what is going on so far?
  Woody Allen: (casually) No.
• In one draft of the script for the second Kill Bill film, Pai Mei's lips would be speaking Cantonese, while his voice (dubbed by Tarantino) would be in English. This isn't the case in the final though, as Gordon Liu does his own dialogue. Also, a deleted scene in the first film features Michael Jai White doing a very impressive imitation of a bad dub job.
• Two examples from the Wayne's World films revolving around the character of Cassandra.
  • In Wayne's World, Wayne is talking to Cassandra in her native Cantonese, when she asks him what happened with his previous girlfriend. Wayne says two syllables in Cantonese, and two paragraphs in subtitled English. They even get visibly bored waiting for the subtitles to end.
  • In Wayne's World 2, Cassandra's father is unimpressed by Wayne speaking to him in (subtitled) Cantonese. When he decides to start a fight, Wayne brings up how it's traditional to be dubbed during combat. From the next line on, they have Hong Kong Dubs, including Mike Myers dubbing himself.
• In the first of the Police Academy movies, Larvelle Jones (played by Michael Winslow, a.k.a. the guy who does the funny sounds) puts on a Martial Arts Headband, makes Funny Bruce Lee Noises and flaps his mouth in imitation of this trope to intimidate some thugs. Jones would also do the dub gag in the following films.
  Larvelle Jones: Wanna fight? Fight me!
• A lot of old Italian films were this way; they would film the movie without a soundtrack, and dub dialogue in later (Federico Fellini in particular liked to play the piano while filming). If you pay attention, you can frequently see minor lip synch slips. Just to give an example, in Fellini Satyricon, the dialogue is nothing but foreign actors counting from one to ten over and over, which was then dubbed over in Italian with... something not much more coherent. Fellini gave two reasons: to confuse the audience, and because there were no homosexual actors in Italy.
• Independent film Kung-Phoooey has one actor does this while the rest of the cast speak normally.
  "Everyone from Hong Kong speaks like this."
• Parodied to hell and back in Tongan Ninja. The cast members regularly emit lines of dialogue from their closed mouths, especially Action Fighter.
• The Japanese scientist in Attack of the Killer Tomatoes! is very obviously dubbed over by what sounds like an overly bored George Takei doing a robot impression, completely missing his mouth flaps. Given the tone of the rest of the film it cannot be anything but parodic.
• The Australian comedy film Hercules Returns is about a trio of cinema owners who have to hurriedly dub the film Samson and His Mighty Challenge during the red carpet premiere: this framing device takes up about 15 minutes of the film, with the remaining 65 given over to seeing their result.
• In Elvira's Haunted Hills, everybody talks normally except for one badly-dubbed character. Lampshaded when Elvira turns to the camera to ask, "How does he do that?"
• The independent short feature No Place Like Home (an adaptation of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz) is mostly shot in on-camera English dialogue, except for the "Cowardly Lion", a samurai whose mouth movements don't match his dubbed English dialogue.
• Backstroke of the West, is one such dub, featuring the script of the infamous Recursive Translation of Revenge of the Sith. This one eventually got so popular that a group of fans began planning such dubs for the rest of the series.

Live-Action TV

• The sketch-comedy Almost Live! did this with its "Billy Quan" kung-fu parodies. Amusingly, one of the actors in the skit (John Keister) always supplied the still-out-of-sync voiceovers for his own character.
  • Later, the character got a minor recurring segment on Bill Nye the Science Guy called "Mind Your Manners with Billy Quan".
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer. In "Restless" Dream Xander is confused when Giles and Anya try to explain what's going on, but they're talking in badly-dubbed French.
• 2012 show Danger 5 has all dialogue (English and subtitled non-English) done like this, as part of its loving homage to old action/adventure television.
• Brazilian group Casseta & Planeta had a Cop Show parody, Fucker and Sucker, where the title characters (two American cops who are transferred to Rio de Janeiro) are portrayed like this. At least once, the voice actors are even present!
• The Green Acres episode "Never Start Talking Unless Your Voice Comes Out" uses this as a running gag, with Eb's voice heard about a second after his mouth moves, then about a second before his mouth moves, and so on.
• This was parodied in an episode of the Honey, I Shrunk the Kids television series when Matheson comes under attack by a mysterious band of ninjas who all talk like this. Diane even flat out says the ninjas are "badly dubbed".
• Hilariously parodied in this sketch from In Living Color! involving Fire Marshall Bill Burns.
• Iron Chef opted for this (wanting an accurate translation) instead of Lip Lock, reasoning that since the bulk of the commentary would be done by off-screen people, it wouldn't matter the times they talked on-screen. And they didn't even bother dubbing Chairman Kaga (subtitling his dialogue instead) unless absolutely necessary because his voice actor wasn't received very well.
• This is parodied in Lizzie McGuire when Matt and Gordo make an audition tape for being in the new Jet Li film. Happens again when the McGuire family sees Matt's ad on TV (the commercial itself was the HK dub-like in that episode).
• The episode "Lost and Found in Translation" from Power Rangers: Dino Thunder, where the Rangers are watching an English-dubbed episode of Bakuryuu Sentai Abaranger ^note Most specifically, episode 10: "Abare Leaguer Bind", the Super Sentai series where the fighting/Megazord scenes and footage for Dino Thunder come from.
• In My Parents Are Aliens, there is an episode where Lucy comes home and finds Brian in a karate outfit and when he talks his lips don't match up with his mouth. Lucy then sees Brian has been watching a karate videotape and tells him that it is dubbed.
• SCTV has two foreign film parodies that are presented as lousy dubs: Rome Italian Style (postwar Italian cinema in general) and Pepi Longsocks (the Compilation Movie edits of a Swedish TV series, and two big screen follow-ups to it, that were released in the U.S. in The '70s).
• Parodied on Whose Line Is It Anyway? every time they played Film & Theater Styles and "kung fu movie" or "spaghetti Western" came up.

Music

• Played straight at the beginning of Fun Lovin' Criminals' music video for Loco (Warning: barely SFW).

Professional Wrestling

• From December 2000 until Taka's release in 2001, Kaientai's gimmick in the then-WWF was that the team were always Hong Kong Dubbed. And this wasn't just for the folks at home, either; they were somehow dubbed in real-time via the arena's sound system. Don't ask how that was supposed to work; it was funny. Taka Michinoku would usually rant about how 'eeevil' they are (with the voice of Bruce Prichard) while Funaki would invariably say only one word: indeed.
  • Think Milli Vanilli concerts.
  • "IIIIIIIIIIIIIINDEEEEEEEEEEEEEEED!"

Puppet Shows

• It's a Very Merry Muppet Christmas Movie also parodies this during the martial arts fight between Miss Piggy and Miss Bitterman.
• Parodied in Episode 4274 of Sesame Street; When Elmo becomes tired of being the shortest one in his group of friends, he uses Abby's magic wand to make himself bigger, until he becomes the size of a building. When Baby Bear sees this, he says, "Look! It is a giant monster!", and moves his mouth after he finishes talking. Later, when Elmo gets upset that he's now too big to play games with his friends, Baby Bear says, "This monster is going to destroy the city!", again continuing to move his mouth after he finishes talking. When Telly asks Baby Bear why he keeps doing it, Baby Bear tells him that he Saw It in a Movie Once, so it seemed like the right thing to do.

Tabletop Games

• Invoked in the Discworld Roleplaying Game: while describing the similarities between the Port Duck setting and Hong Kong action movies, it says "Having their lips move out of sync with their words would be cheap, though".

Video Games

• Serious Sam II parodies this in the beginning cutscene of the boss level of the third world.

Web Animation

• Everybody in Girl-chan in Paradise, with the sole exception of Yusuke, who not only has better animation than everyone else, but whose lip flaps actually match what he's saying, and actually pronounce everything phonetically unlike most anime lip flaps (though as a trade-off he also usually talks incredibly slowly).

Webcomics

• Ben and his friend in Goblin Hollow make Godzilla parody movies in their garage. According to them, the hardest part is getting the lips out of sync with the dialogue in editing.

Web Original

• Kung Tai Ted, one of Brad Jones' characters, talks in a perpetual Hong Kong Dub as a deliberate pastiche of the movies he features on his show. In one video, his voice actor changes in the middle of a fight because he was bought out by a different dubbing company. Weirdly enough, it is a fight against The Cinema Snob.
• Things Mr. Welch Is No Longer Allowed to Do in an RPG:
  9. My monk's lips must be in sync.
• Ninja the Mission Force, as an Affectionate Parody of the Godfrey Ho Ninja Movies, does this deliberately.
• Epic Rap Battles of History: The video for Clint Eastwood vs Bruce Lee has some deliberately bad lip-syncing during a line mocking that type of dub.
  Eastwood: You should spend more time matching your voice up to your lips!
• Nigahiga's Daily Life of Ninjahinja.
• The character of Rita Repulsa from Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers was even featured in a few The Nostalgia Critic movie reviews, including his review of Turbo: A Power Rangers Movie and Devil. In these episodes, she was physically played by Rachel Tietz while being badly dubbed (deliberately) by Doug Walker. Also shows up in the Dragon Ball Z parody sketch in the opening of his Dragonball Evolution review, also featuring LittleKuriboh and MasakoX.

Western Animation

• The Adventures of Sam and Max parodies this in "The Second Show Ever", when the Freelance Police mistake a sushi chef at Career Day for a knife-wielding lunatic.
• Rugrats referenced this trope with everyone watching a dubbed Reptar film and the on-screen characters saying things that didn't synch up with their lips. At one point an actor is obviously speaking a lengthy sentence while the voice just says "Yeah."
• The Simpsons:
  • In the episode "Marge in Chains", Osaka factory workers have lip movements that don't match their spoken lines in a parody of this. Most notably, their Evil Laugh apparently lasted much longer in the "original" Japanese.
  • "Kamp Krusty" has Krusty's introduction video for Mr. Black, the head of the camp, being very obviously dubbed over.
• Family Guy plays a similar gag by showing characters from Speed Racer talking with sped up voices and badly synced mouth movements.
• Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends featured an episode that had Mac taking on bullies after training by watching Kung-Fu movies. Hence he somehow forces his lips not to match his actual voice.
  Mac: [to bully, complete with the bad lip synching from Kung-Fu movies] You have disgraced my people! We shall now engage in combat!
• Rocko's Modern Life: “A Sucker for the Suck-O-Magic” parodies this in a sequence referencing Godzilla, where a bug that is clearly screaming is badly dubbed over by a voice saying that they must all flee the city from “Suck-O-Zilla”.
• The Fairly OddParents! did the same thing as Family Guy when they parodied Speed Racer in the TV movie Channel Chasers by having the actors do over-the-top takes of the lines, speaking very fast and doing over-the-top reactions to things. It might also be used to illustrate how dubbing has gotten better since the 60s, since the later Dragon Ball parody has the lips match the dialogue.
• In the Bob's Burgers episode "Hawk and Chick", Bob and Louise obtain their favorite Japanese film to show at a film festival, but the only copy they can get is the original version, meaning it's not dubbed or has any subtitles. To solve the problem, the Belchers decide to dub the film themselves, resulting in this.
• In the South Park episode "Franchise Prequel", Mark Zuckerberg's voice does not match his lip movements, and his audio quality is noticeably worse than everyone else's.
• Batman: The Brave and the Bold does this when adapting a 60s Batman manga story, which is in the style of old, clumsily dubbed broadcasts of Astro Boy. It's more subtle than most deliberate examples, but the dialogue spoken clearly doesn't match the lip flaps. There's also a bit where Robin says something very hurriedly, as if his line was too long to fit in the existing footage without Speed Racer-esque fast-talking. Bat-Mite implies that the dialogue was hastily rewritten to conceal the fact that the main villain died.

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